by Ian Douglas
And there they were! Flying in close-knit formation, Starhawk fighters whipped around their singularities to fall into new vectors, hurtling into the densest clouds of alien vessels. Both sides, Grunmeyer could see, were taking heavy casualties.
And then the Ma’at Mons came under direct attack from a squadron of four alien vessels. Grunmeyer didn’t recognize them; they weren’t listed in the Ma’at’s warbook, though their mass and overall length—one to two hundred meters—suggested that they were similar to Confederation frigates or destroyers. A savage explosion vaporized a portion of the Ma’at’s shield cap as she turned to face the new threat, and alarms shrilled throughout the vessel.
This would not, could not go on for very much longer.
Lieutenant Shay Ryan
VFA-44
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1349 hours, TFT
“Here we go!” Donovan’s voice called over the tactical net, the words slightly garbled by the relativistic distortions within the wormhole’s shaft. “Lights out!”
Ahead was a glaring ring of blue light, the radiance from the far end of the tunnel focused into a ring by her speed. And then her screens came up to full and the glare winked out, leaving her alone within a darkness relieved only by the gleam of her cockpit lights and instrumentation.
Shay found herself wondering about the workings of the tunnel. It was definitely a two-way transport device. What would happen if she met someone coming through from the other side, from the opposite direction?
Then she decided that she didn’t want to know. There was fear enough attached to the thought of what was waiting for them at the other end of this impossible tunnel. She was gripping both arms of her seat with a fierce determination laced with terror. By now, the Confederation missile ships and destroyers up ahead should have engaged the enemy, should have blanketed the tunnel exit with nuclear flame, but there was no way to know. She continued to hurtle through empty darkness, dreading the touch of a Sh’daar beam. If one hit her, if it even grazed her ship, she would never feel it, she knew, but the agony of waiting dragged on through the slow-passing seconds.
She must be out of the tunnel by now. Her screens were drawing energy from her power tap, drawing at a torrential rate. She must be passing through the expected fireball, shedding the ambient radiation and star-hot plasma as she slowed.
And then the universe outside winked on once more.
She plowed through a sea of radiant plasma. Around her, above, below, and to every side, ships crumpled and burned, shields and screens failing, wreckage tumbling, new detonations flaring against a night packed solid with a background of tightly massed stars. Directly ahead, the destroyer Santiago, half of her length sheered away, tumbled helplessly as swarms of alien fighters descended on her helpless corpse.
In past battles, the capital ships of CBG-18 had survived by making high-velocity passes of enemy fleets or armored facilities, turning the target acquisition, tracking, and firing of the weapons over to AIs with far swifter reflexes than humans. At high speed, ships were hard to track, harder to hit, and even a badly damaged ship would be carried by its residual velocity clear of the battlespace.
This time, however, that particular defensive charm was not available. Ships emerging from the tunnel wormhole lost most of their transit velocity as they emerged into normal space, shedding excess energy in dazzling eruptions of light, which suggested that, as with the Alcubierre Drive, it was the space within the tunnel that was moving at near-c, not the ships themselves. When they emerged, they dropped back to velocities of a few hundred meters per second, a relative snail’s pace that left them slow and vulnerable targets. The enemy’s defensive fire was concentrating on the larger vessels—particularly on the three bombardment ships.
The fighters, however, could accelerate at fifty thousand gravities, which meant that in one second they could cover five hundred kilometers. They actually had to rein themselves in, or they would have been well outside of the battle zone in an instant; their acceleration did, however, give them tremendous maneuverability within the close confines of this battlespace, and made them extremely difficult to hit.
Shay brought her Starhawk in to within a few kilometers of an alien vessel—what amounted to point-blank range—and triggered two quick bursts. The target, a flattened silvery egg fifty meters long, deflected the first shot with its shields, but seemed to be jolted by the second. Debris hurtled away from a crater gouged into its surface.
Nearby enemy ships opened fire, but Shay’s fighter was already in motion once more, ducking back, twisting, returning, darting, taking advantage of her ship’s maneuverability. Again and again, she zorched through enemy formations, savaging them, tearing them apart, scattering them as she hammered at them with particle beams and close-range Gatling rounds. Targets at longer ranges were prey for her Krait missiles. Again and again she thoughtclicked distant targets, then released salvos of the nuclear-tipped smart hunter-killers. Light flooded the surrounding cosmos.
Her AI monitored her commands closely. Twice, it blocked her attempt to fire an instant before a friendly fighter moved into her line of fire. And once it refused an order to change course because the maneuver would have resulted in her fighter slamming into the hull of an alien vessel as big as a Confederation battleship.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she yelled as her Starhawk hurtled clear of the battle, missing the intended target.
“The requested maneuver would have resulted in this fighter’s destruction,” her AI replied, its voice infuriatingly calm and precise in her head.
“Well then you fly the thing!” she demanded. She didn’t know now whether she was feeling rage or terror. Maybe it was both . . . but she felt as though she was at the breaking point.
“Human pilots,” the AI replied, still with that maddening calm, “are more flexible, more creative, and better able to choose surprising tactics than artificially intelligent systems. The ideal is for human and machine to work together in close symbiosis. . . .”
But Shay wasn’t listening. She’d spotted three leaf-fighters that were themselves pursuing a Starhawk from the Impactors, twisted her fighter around, and dropped into a trailing intercept vector. Voices called and crackled through the flame-seared void.
“Impact Seven! This is Impact Seven! I have three fish on my tail!”
“Hang on, Seven!” Shay called. “I’m on ’em!”
“Get them off!”
Too far for Gatlings, too close for missiles. As she focused on the lead enemy fighter, she thoughtclicked a command to engage her PBP, and saw the fighter explode on her high-mag imaging. She shifted targets, locked . . . fired. At the same instant, Impactor Seven flipped end for end, flying backward as he opened up with his Gatling on the remaining alien fighter, ripping it apart with a high-velocity stream of kinetic-kill rounds.
She shifted vectors yet again, letting her attention sweep throughout the entire volume of space surrounding her. Combat required a constant balance of the pilot’s attention between the tightly focused and the broad and panoramic sweep. Without complete situational awareness, you could get into serious trouble very swiftly indeed.
She loosed another salvo of missiles, scoring a direct hit on an enemy warship the size of a large cruiser. Ahead, both the Gurrierre and the Cheng Hua appeared to be dead in space, surrounded by expanding bubbles of debris, glittering specks of ice from their onboard water supplies gushing into hard vacuum and freezing.
The glow from the initial nuclear bombardment was almost completely dissipated now, the stars in the surrounding background hard and brilliant. Some streamers, however, arced through the sky, following, perhaps, lines of magnetic force centered on the TRGA wormhole mouth.
Her AI directed her attention to another alien vessel of unknown design—similar to a Turusch Alpha-class battleship, but squatter and chunkier, and it was closing on the Cheng Hua.
Standard combat communications protocol required her to identify a targe
t as she locked on . . . but this was, as fighter pilots liked to put it, a target-rich environment, so much so that the Confederation fire-control network was unable to label the enemy ships with identifying codes. The battle had very swiftly degenerated into an all-out melee, a furball beyond the ability of even the best and fastest AIs to direct.
Locking on to the massive alien, she triggered a Krait launch, shouting, “Fox One!” Lock, fire. “Fox One!”
The enemy battleship’s main batteries were firing into the Cheng Hua barely three hundred kilometers distant, now, ripping into the Hegemony missile cruiser’s flanks, knocking out her gravitic shields.
Then Shay’s missiles struck the alien from astern, the nuclear fireballs hammering down the big ship’s shields, penetrating her hull, then lighting her up from within. The aft quarter of the big vessel simply disintegrated, and the forward section began crumpling and twisting as the singularities of the vessel’s power plant chewed along the stricken warship’s spine. Pieces the size of skyscrapers tumbled away from the collapsing shell.
“Great shot, Shay!” someone yelled over the squadron net. She was startled to realize that it had been Lawrence Kuhn.
“This is Lightning Five! Santiago’s in trouble!”
“Five, One! See if you can brush those fish off her hull!”
Fish. Those swarming leaf-shaped fighters did look like schooling fish. And there were so many of them, too many, descending upon the crippled North American destroyer in gleaming, massed thousands. Shay threw her drive singularity to port and whipped around it in a tight vector change. Technically in free fall, she didn’t feel the crushing force of acceleration, but she skimmed close enough to the microsingularity that the fighter shrieked protest, and she felt the ominous, sickening pull of unbalanced tidal forces. Too close!
And too late! Santiago exploded, her remaining weapons load detonating in a silent, savage flash that took out thousands of enemy fighters.
Shay swore bitterly, then boosted her acceleration, slashing through the cloud of surviving enemy fighters, ripping at them with her Gatling cannon, screaming aloud as she plunged through the swirling silver-gray cloud.
More ships of the fleet were arriving, heavy cruisers, like the Russian Groznyy and the Brazilian Defensora. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid followed, closely shadowed by the frigates Brown, Vreeland, and Badger. One of the asteroid fortresses now was glowing white hot, its surface molten with the incessant nuclear bombardment from the incoming warships. The Sh’daar fleet appeared to be wavering, then breaking, with many of the smaller ships streaming off into the depths of the star cluster.
The door-kickers had delivered the kick . . . and now they had their foot through the door and solidly planted on the other side.
The big vessels, though, appeared to be hunkering down for a determined defense. An immense vessel, a reshaped planetoid two kilometers long, fell across her path, apparently trying to maneuver for a shot at the Ma’at Mons. Shay nudged her fighter into an intercept vector, targeting the flying mountain with her last five Krait missiles.
God! Had she run through her warload already? She’d started the fight with thirty-two missiles n her internal bays. She didn’t remember firing that many, didn’t remember engaging that many enemy ships. Those last VG-92s slipped from her bay, however, as she shouted a triumphant final “Fox One!”
The enemy’s gravitic shielding wasn’t quite as good as Confederation technology, one of the few areas in which the human forces had an advantage. Late-hour bull sessions in the squadron rec bay speculated endlessly about this, and on how outnumbered human pilots could best take advantage of it. Where screens used intense electromagnetic radiation to deflect incoming charged particle beams or radiation, shields used microsingularities to warp space immediately around a ship’s hull, a distortion that could deflect or scatter incoming beams, and rip warheads to shreds. The two worked together. An overloaded screen could leak enough joules from a PBP to vaporize exposed shield projectors, causing a partial failure. Space combat tactics emphasized hitting a shielded target with everything available to overwhelm its shields and cause significant damage.
Detonating a string of one-megaton nukes in close proximity to the target was an excellent way to achieve this.
The alien planetoid-ship was large enough, massive enough, and heavily shielded enough to shrug off three of Shay’s Krait missiles, but the fourth punched through and vaporized an immense white-glowing gouge into the mountain’s flank. The fifth, her last missile, exploded silently within the hot crater, punching through to a warren of chambers and passageways deep inside.
Atmosphere jetted into space, a powerful lateral rocket that put the damaged planetoid in an awkward tumble. Donovan’s Starhawk put two more Kraits into the wreck ten seconds later, and the blasts reduced the planetoid to a half dozen broken fragments falling outward from a blossoming flower of hot plasma.
The Sh’daar fighters, lightly shielded, many badly damaged, were in full retreat, now. Shay ignored them, concentrating instead on the enemy’s capital ships. There were at least a hundred of these, some of them enormous, and the human fleet was still seriously outnumbered.
And with no more nuclear weapons in her personal arsenal, Shay was limited in what she could do.
But more fighters were coming through the tunnel, now, squadrons from the United States of North America and the Lincoln and Illustrious. Her CPGs could still knock out enemy screens and render their shield projectors vulnerable . . . and if even one Sh’daar point-defense turret was tracking her, it wouldn’t be tracking one of the fresh and fully armed fighters.
She selected yet another target and vectored in. . . .
Chapter Seventeen
30 June 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1354 hours, TFT
America entered the tunnel mouth.
Somewhere on the other side of that alien transport system, most of the carrier’s fighters would be battling for their lives. It was time for the mother ship to come in and lend her not inconsiderable support.
The last of the fighters had gone on through, along with twelve frigates, eight destroyers, three light cruisers, and the railgun cruiser Kinkaid. And now it was America’s turn.
The carrier approached the kilometer-wide maw, her sensors detecting the irresistible tug of rapidly increasing gravitational forces. There were no tidal effects, thank God, and no sensation of acceleration, merely a steady, smooth flow of the space within which America was currently imbedded. On the CIC display screens, the cylinder mouth appeared to yawn around America on every side, its rotation so fast that any surface detail whatsoever was blurred into a featureless silver-gray. The ship’s sensors, at this range, detected other pieces of the immense structure invisible to the unaided eye—a complex weaving of magnetic fields forming a kind of funnel shape approaching the material portion of the artifact.
And beyond—within the maw—space itself was acting quite odd indeed.
The ships of the battlegroup had been moving without incident through the TRGA smoothly for the past thirty minutes or so. Koenig, as always trying to anticipate the worst in order to prepare for it, had closely and repeatedly questioned his physics people on how the tunnel worked. Obviously things went both ways . . . but how did it know not to admit spacecraft from the other side? Was it possible for the enemy to drop a salvo of missiles—or a fair-sized planetoid—in at the other end and destroy ships coming through from this side?
The physicists had spoken, with what seemed to Koenig to be a lack of certainty, of dark matter currents triggered by an object entering one end or the other, and of the flow being one-way. Since the artifact appeared to use gravitational acceleration as a conveyer, that conveyer—the dark-matter currents—could only move in one direction at a time, and it appeared that that direction was set by ships entering the magnetic fields surrounding the openings. It was possible, even probable, that
the thing possessed an AI that monitored traffic . . . but if that was the case, why was it allowing the Confederation vessels through at all? Hell, for that matter, if the Sh’daar were controlling the tunnel, it ought to be simple enough to collapse the wormhole with the human ships in-transit.
Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be an issue. The controlling intelligence might not be capable of telling the difference between Sh’daar ships and human . . . or it simply didn’t care. Or perhaps the Sh’daar couldn’t—or wouldn’t—risk destroying the technological wonder, either by switching it off or by triggering an incalculable explosion inside through a head-on collision at near-c.
It was even possible that the TRGA cylinder had not been constructed by the Sh’daar, but had been created by some other, older, even more advanced galactic civilization. Koenig passionately hoped that that was the case. The Sh’daar, whoever and whatever they might be, were far advanced technologically beyond human capabilities, but the science behind the tunnel was sheer magic. The carrier battlegroup—and Humankind itself—had little chance for survival in a contest against beings that could crush a star to create a space-spanning bridge.
Which, once again, raised the question of why the Sh’daar War had already lasted for thirty-eight years. A civilization powerful enough to build the tunnel, surely, would scarcely be inconvenienced by the Earth Confederation, could conquer or extinguish Humankind, if it so desired, with a casual sweep of a grasping appendage.
There had to be more to the Sh’daar, to their culture, their way of thinking, which humans still were missing. Their fear of other races developing high technology, perhaps, or simply the fact that even the Sh’daar were dwarfed in their attempts at empire-building and controlling by the sheer scale of the galaxy.
